While advocating for relaxed zoning, Mayor Lurie acknowledges it is not a silver bullet for housing affordability. He states that high interest rates, labor, and material costs are the primary blockers to new construction, meaning policy changes won't trigger immediate development or rent drops.

The collapse of Katerra, which burned through $2-3 billion in VC funding, shows that simply applying factory models to construction is not enough. The startup's failure highlights that deep, systemic issues like logistics, regulation, and on-site complexity cannot be solved by capital alone.

To solve ill-fitting double-wide mobile homes, Clayton Homes innovated its manufacturing. Instead of building two halves separately and hoping they'd align, they built the entire home as a single unit, then sawed it in half for transport, ensuring a perfect reassembly on site.

Unlike lightweight goods, heavy housing modules are uneconomical to ship more than a day's drive. This physical constraint prevents the creation of massive, centralized factories, forcing a model of smaller, distributed plants that cannot achieve the same economies of scale.

The housing industry is resistant to startup disruption due to immense "activation energy." This includes hyper-local regulations, fragmented distribution, cyclical capital needs, and a complex web of legacy players. Overcoming this barrier requires decades of effort, creating a powerful moat for incumbents.

Construction projects have limited upside (e.g., 10-15% under budget) but massive downside (100-300%+ over budget). This skewed risk profile rationally incentivizes builders to stick with predictable, traditional methods rather than adopt new technologies that could lead to catastrophic overruns.

Contrary to most industries that see technological gains, housing construction has become less efficient. This stagnation is a key, often overlooked driver of housing affordability issues, as the fundamental cost to build has not decreased with technology.

Automation in construction can do more than just lower costs for basic structures. Monumental's robots can create complex, artistic brick patterns and designs at the same speed and cost as a standard wall, potentially democratizing access to beautiful and diverse housing aesthetics.

Legally mandated parking spaces for every new building add tens of thousands of dollars to construction costs and raise rents. These laws also make it impossible to reuse older, historic buildings that can't accommodate parking, fundamentally forcing modern architecture to be designed around cars.